Ode To Afternoon Naps: A Poem

Thank God for afternoon naps.
I need to rest for a spell.
While you may be quite drowsy,
I'm resting very well.

Though I'm comfy under my blankets,
I really must confess:
I think I slept too long
'cause I'm a groggy mess.

And I really ought to be working.

The hell of buying carpet

My office chair is destroying my hardwood floors. So, in an effort to mitigate the damage, I decided to buy a carpet. It was the first ever carpet I've purchased.

It was a ferociously painful experience.

My room is oddly shaped. It looks a bit like a tetris piece and a cancerous amoeba had a bastard child. I needed a carpet that is 9'2" by 10'10" costing, ideally, somewhere under $100. Unless I went for custom, I knew I wasn't going to get exactly that size, but I was lucky enough to find an 8'9" by 10' carpet at Home Depot for $80!

Perfect!

I convinced my favorite roommate, Anthony, to let me borrow him and his truck for an hour this afternoon to go pick it up. But the Home Depot I wanted to go to is on a street called South Willow. Anyone who has driven around in Manchester for any length of time knows that South Willow is the second bastion of Hell's burning undead. So we went to the other Home Depot instead. But the other Home Depot didn't have the carpet I wanted.

Anthony bravely decided to brave the fiery hoards driving South Willow and take me to that Home Depot. They had the carpet.

But they didn't have any customer service associates who wanted to help me. The first associate I tried to fleece for help literally ran away from me. He saw me bee-lining for him, turned, and scurried off.

I went to two associates who were having a fine conversation. The woman associate wouldn't shut up to help me. The man associate did shut up and asked me what the hell I wanted, but he was much too inconvenienced to actually help me. So he paged someone else. The three other associates who showed up when paged decided to do anything and everything except help me.

So I left without my carpet. Fuck you, Home Depot.

Anthony and I went to Lowe's. I walked in and the associates were tripping over their aprons to help me pick out a carpet.

They didn't have one the precise dimensions I wanted, but they did have a carpet 12' by 100', which they'll cut down to size for you. 12' is about 14" too long for my room, but I did get them to cut it to 9', presumably so I'd be about 2" shy, which would be perfect because my bed would cover that missing chunk up. In reality, they cut me about 12'3"x9'7". But that's okay. I was able to cut off the extra bits with my knife, and actually it looks really cool because it fits the Tetris bits of my room perfectly! Thank you, Lowe's.

Although the Lowe's associate who helped me must have thought I fell off the pumpkin truck a day early. I was looking for a 9' wide by 11' long carpet, but I told him that a 11' wide by 9' long carpet would be just as good. He looked at me for a moment before he said:

"But you know those two would come out to be the same thing, right?"

Yes, I understand the commutative aspects of Euclidean geometry. But thanks for pointing that out. While we're on the subject of the galactically obvious, you know your apron makes you look like a twit, right?

But that's okay. I got my carpet installed, and it looks purdy, and it feels nice on the toes.

But who ever knew that buying carpet would be such a harrowing ordeal? Frankly, I blame the economy. It's too strong, and those Home Depot clowns aren't fearing properly for their jobs yet.

Of all the aspects of being an adult that I've yet encountered, carpet, by far, would have to be one of the most difficult. One of the most frustrating would be dealing with banks. But this was one of the most difficult.

It's "Texture", and its the color of cinnamon and sugar. It matches my cherry-red walls. (Okay, it probably doesn't, but it does protect my hard-wood floors.)

Why are gas prices going down? Because screw you, Chinese!

I just paid $2.50/gallon for gas. The average around here seems to be under three bucks. That's a full dollar at least less than it was a few months ago. Why are gas prices dropping?

According to Time/CNN:

Gas Prices Dropping: The Good News and Bad News:

The bad news is the reason for the price cut: the global economy is headed for a serious slump, which is already slashing demand for oil. Consumers all over the world had already begun cutting back on their consumption in response to the upward price shock. Now economic growth is slowing everywhere.

Oh good.

I save $1/gallon on gas. And a billion Chinese starve to death after being laid off because the fat cats in Washington and New York want a third yacht and a private moon colony.

And why did the economy do a swan dive into the wood chipper?

True News 1: War and the Price of Patriotism



The worst part of a depression isn't the financial hardship. (At least not for me.)

The worst part is that the free market is being blamed. That is bad because it has really opened my eyes about how brilliant evil people can be. If a mugger can convince you that your bodyguard is robbing you while he, the mugger, has his own hand in your pocket ... well, that is one mighty sparky brigand.

He's protecting you.

But on the plus side, gas is only $2.50/gallon.

Free audiobook: The Castle of Otranto

I have completed my first solo audio book recording. I present:

The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, read by me, published by LibriVox and distributed by Archive.org, and released into the public domain in all countries.

I quite enjoyed reading this book. Around about chapter three, things really start taking off. There are only five chapters, and they are long'uns. But I highly recommend this book, and I hope you enjoy my rendition.

My attempt to pass as a 17 year old British girl

I have recently started recording Uncle Silas by J. Sheridan Le Fanu. (Here is a link to the Wikipedia article on "Uncle Silas".) Generally speaking, I don't read the books I record before I record them. I don't even read the chapter I'm going to record before I'm actually recording it. That's part of the reward for me.

This can cause some interesting results. Sometimes I realize a character sounds different than I was originally voicing him, for example.

This time, I get my recording gear out, set up, break out my water and pineapples (ideal recording food), chase away my noisy roommates, and sit down to record. I open the book and get through the prologue just fine and start on Chapter One. It's only now that I run into my first hitch.

A girl, of a little more than seventeen, looking, I believe, younger still; slight and rather tall, with a great deal of golden hair, dark grey-eyed, and with a countenance rather sensitive and melancholy, was sitting at the tea-table, in a reverie. I was that girl.

So the narrator is a 17 year old girl? Yeah, I think I can pull this off. When I was a kid, I was mistaken for my mom all the time when answering the telephone. Apparently, I'm a natural.

Later on in the novel, a main character is introduced: Madame de la Rougierre. She's an evil French woman who speaks with a very heavy accent (Le Fanu wrote her accent into the text).

I can't do a French accent. Oh, but I do attempt so. My version of Madame sounds a bit like a female version of Pepe Le Pew.

Also, though this book is called "Uncle Silas", and Chapter 2 was called "Uncle Silas", I'm not sure if Uncle Silas has actually made an appearance yet. We've met a few male characters who were unnamed---any of them could have been Uncle Silas. I have a feeling that I may be going back to re-record some dialog when Uncle Silas makes a non-anonymous appearance in the book.

Naturally, the main character, Maud, the point-of-view character, calls her father "Papa". In American, "papa" is pronounced "PAHP-uh". In British, it's pronounced "puh-PAH". Hmm. I can't effect a convincing RP or cockney accent (or any other British accent), so I've been reading mostly with an American accent. I do a fair American accent, but I've been practicing it now for about 25 years. I tend to fluctuate, though, between pronouncing "papa" the correct way and the British way. :-P

I love recording audio books.

Rockbox bug with iRiver H140 (iHP-140)

I've encountered an odd bug/feature when using the voice recording feature of my iRiver H140 running Rockbox firmware. I'll be recording, everything is just fine, but when I press STOP to save the recording to the disk, Rockbox gives me an error that I have run out of disk space. I'm not sure why, because both the Rockbox firmware and Windows Vista report that I have at least 6 GB of 37 GB free. I ran scandisk and defrag on the iRiver volume, and everything seems to check out. I assume it is a Rockbox buffering issue rather than a hard disk issue.

The disk is full. Press STOP to continue.

(In the source code file, it also lists "The disk is full. Press OFF to continue." and "The disk is full. Press LEFT to continue." as similar error messages for other platforms.)

The really frustrating part is that this issue is hard to reproduce. It doesn't happen every time I record. Sometimes it gives me the error after a bare 20 minutes of recording. Other times I have recorded the television for upwards of seven hours without problem.

RockBox version: r18399-080903
Disk: 37.2 GB
Free: 6.04 GB

It looks like this may be a known bug: http://www.rockbox.org/tracker/7721

This is a particularly maddening problem because I lose several minutes of dictation. I don't have a solution for it yet. I'm making this post largely to document the problem. If I do figure it out---or hear from someone who does---I'll be sure to update this for any future Google searchers with the same issues.